Chapter 155: The Year Turns
ULF
Ulf shut the solar door with his shoulder and stood there a moment with his hand still on the iron, listening to the corridor. Two guards at the stair. A servant's steps going away toward the kitchens. Nothing else. He'd been doing that since Rook's Rest and he wasn't sure he could stop, but he made himself let go of the handle and turn around.
He hadn't told Helaena about the man in the merchant's hood at the edge of the square that afternoon. She hadn't asked. She'd come down off the steps of the Great Sept into the noise of her own name, and her eyes had gone past the cheering to the same face he'd found, and neither of them had said one word about it on the walk back. That was a decision they'd made without making it. It could keep until morning. Tonight the door was closed.
The table had been dragged near the hearth, which was against every rule of the household and nobody had objected. Roast mutton, brown bread still warm enough to steam when Jaehaerys tore it, carrots done in honey because Maelor wouldn't eat them any other way, a jug of wine watered so far down it was barely pink. No steward. No taster. Helaena had sent them all out an hour ago with the particular flat courtesy she used when she wanted something and expected no argument.
Outside, the wind came off the Blackwater and rattled the shutters, and under the wind there was nothing. That was the strange part. For a year the city had made noise all night, hammers and carts and the shouting of men working by torchlight to put roofs back on. Now the scaffolds were down and the streets had gone quiet, and the quiet sat in Ulf's ears like water.
"New rule," Jaehaerys said, before anyone had finished serving. "Nobody says lord. Nobody says council. Nobody says crown."
"That's three rules," Jaehaera said.
"It's one rule with three parts." He was nine now, and he'd grown four inches since the cisterns, and he said it straight out, daring you to argue, same as he said everything these days. "I've had lords all day. Two of them wanted me to settle a dispute about a mill."
"Did you settle it?" Ulf asked.
"I said I'd think about it. That's what you do."
"That's what I do when I already know the answer and want them to sweat. Do you know the answer?"
"No."
"Then say so next time. Sweating them only works once." Ulf reached over and took the last of the bread out of the boy's hand before he could eat it, and Jaehaerys made a noise of pure outrage that had nothing of a king in it at all.
Jaehaera had brought a sheaf of paper to dinner and set it beside her plate where it would be noticed. She didn't mention it. She ate three bites of mutton, moved her carrots into a neat row, and then said, to nobody in particular, "I finished eleven since the harvest."
"Eleven what?" Helaena asked, which was the answer her daughter had been waiting for.
"Drawings. There's a ship with no crew. There's the sept with the roof on. There's Ser Cole's horse, but the legs came out wrong, so I did it again and the second one is better." She looked at her mother with that flat, careful seriousness she'd had since she was four. "You can see them after."
"I'll see them after," Helaena said.
She said nothing about the golden-scaled dragon, and neither did anyone else. It still hung in her chambers where she'd pinned it, blood dried brown on the wing, and Ulf had walked past it that morning and kept walking.
Maelor knocked his spoon off the table twice on purpose. Helaena picked it up twice. The third time she left it on the floor and he stared at the place where it had been with enormous betrayal, then climbed into her lap instead.
"It's been two years since the city fell," Jaehaerys said. He'd stopped chewing. "Two years since we came home."
"Two years of peace," Helaena said. "The longest peace the realm has known since before the Dance began."
"Will it last?" Jaehaera asked.
His shoulders started to set the way they did before a fight, and he made them stop. "Peace never lasts on its own," he said. "It has to be protected. Built. Maintained. Every day. Every choice. But the realm is stronger now than it was two years ago. The institutions are working. The lords are cooperating, mostly. The threats are being watched." He met Jaehaerys's eyes. "It'll last as long as we keep working to make it last."
"That was council talk," Jaehaerys said. "You broke my rule."
"I did."
"Then you're not allowed pudding."
"There isn't any pudding."
"There's pudding," Jaehaera said. "I saw it come up the stairs."
The fire cracked and threw a knot of sparks against the screen. Helaena had gone quiet with Maelor's head under her chin, and Ulf knew that quiet: her thumb had stopped moving on the boy's back, and her eyes had gone to the middle of the room and found nothing there.
When she spoke, her voice had changed. Softer. Certain, more certain than she ever let herself sound.
"The hidden flame waits for daylight. When it rises, the sky remembers gold."
Nobody moved. Even Maelor had stopped fidgeting.
"What does it mean?" Jaehaerys asked.
"I don't know yet. But the visions don't come without purpose. Something is waiting. Something that hasn't yet been revealed. And when it emerges, when the hidden flame finally rises, the sky will remember what gold looks like." She found Ulf across the table. "It's not a warning. It's a promise."
He didn't answer. He wanted to ask her four questions and he asked none of them, because Jaehaera had already gone back to her carrots and Jaehaerys was pouring himself more of the pink water, and if he opened that door the evening was finished.
The pudding came up. It was burnt at one edge and they ate it anyway.
After, Jaehaera spread her eleven drawings across the hearth rug and named each one, and her mother knelt on the floor in her good wool and looked at all of them, including the horse with the wrong legs. Maelor fell asleep sitting upright. Jaehaerys argued for another hour and lost, and Ulf carried him to his bed at the end of it, which he was almost too big for, and which he would be too big for by spring.
"They'll remember tonight as nothing," Helaena said in the dark of the passage. "A supper. Burnt pudding. That's what I wanted."
"That's what they got."
"Then don't tell me the rest until morning."
"I wasn't going to."
He slept badly and woke before the bell, and went to the window because that was where he always went. The wind had dropped. Below the Red Keep the roofs ran down toward the water in long grey ranks, tile and thatch and new-cut timber, and the Blackwater lay flat and colourless with the fishing boats already out on it.
Then the light came up over the far bank and the sky above the river turned rose, and then gold, and the gold ran down the rebuilt towers of King's Landing one after another until the whole city was standing in it. Somewhere below, a bell began, and a dog, and then the carts.
Helaena came and put her hand flat between his shoulder blades and stood there with him, and he watched the light spread and did not say the thing he'd been carrying since the square.